When I graduated from college over four years ago (whaaat) I immediately jumped into an internship in pharmaceutical advertising. I had the feeling I wasn’t fit for corporate life every day, but I still felt I should see if there was a job I could grow to love.
I spent every waking moment of free time in my internship researching health and nutrition. It got to the point where I felt like tasks for my actual job were interrupting my research of nutrition. I’m not sure if my superiors caught on, but if they did, they definitely weren’t my biggest fan.
My studies of nutrition started to directly conflict with the industry of pharmaceutical advertising. I developed a severe distaste to the overuse of pharmaceuticals in our country. I cringed every time I saw a drug’s branding initiative to ‘reword’ messaging with the goal to make the public ‘unaware’ that death is a potential side effect of the drug.
It clearly wasn’t for me. I needed out…
How I found IIN
Through a referral of a friend, I landed a job at The Weather Channel in NYC and ran as fast as I could from pharmaceutical advertising. I didn’t completely hate the job at Weather Channel, but I was still drastically drawn to nutrition in my every waking moment.
It didn’t matter that I was in the process of learning a new industry, all I cared about was filling my mind with knowledge relating to people’s mental and physical wellbeing. At this point, it had been four years that I was drawn to studying nutrition every day, so I thought that I should consider a career in it. I also made the assumption that being enrolled in some kind of school would alleviate my desire to research during work hours.
I started researching more about schools that give a degree in nutrition. I quickly found that a magnitude of the information I wanted to learn more about was missing from curriculums. Most colleges were teaching completely outdated nutritional advice. I looked at the curriculum for dietitians and nutritionists and was appalled at the lack of modern nutritional science.
One of the sections claimed that a piece of WHITE BREAD with peanut butter and MILK was a nutritious and healthy snack. It was 2015 at the time, not 1985…
I also detest bigotry teachings, i.e. people claiming THIS DIET IS THE BEST DIET, and the ONLY one that works correctly. Every person’s body is unique, every body has their own unique DNA and lifestyle.
As I continued my search for a curriculum with my similar values, I stumbled upon a health coach certification program, called IIN (Institute for Integrative Nutrition).
About IIN
IIN’s selling point is that it will teach you how to run your own health coaching business in under 1 year. The curriculum is 10 months long and structured to teach you NUMEROUS diets,- many times taught to you by the diet inventors themselves.
David Wolfe gave a lecture on the raw diet and superfoods, and you’ll hear lectures from the likes of Andrew Weil and Dr. Oz. I watched a few free sample lectures and was HOOKED.
The course teaches more than 100 dietary theories with the goal to teach you how and why so many of these diets work.
IIN’s motto is that it’s all about what works for each individual, and as a health coach it’s your job to lead people to their own conclusion of what will work for them.
IIN’s core curriculum surrounds the belief that people cannot live healthfully because of nutrition alone. It’s taught that there are other aspects to life that are JUST as important as the foods you eat, like your mindset, financial state, career, relationships, spirituality and THEN they mentioned nutrition as a secondary factor. The course is full of TED-talk-like lectures from experts surrounding their dietary and wellness theories.
IIN was everything I was looking for in a curriculum.
At IIN you go through the process of health coaching yourself throughout the first half of the curriculum. What better way to get passionate about what you can offer people than the ability to tell your own story of how it worked for you?
The second half of the curriculum focuses on teaching you how to run your own health coaching business. The curriculum advocates that you begin coaching at this time. I quickly felt that health coaching might not be for me yet (I didn’t feel emotionally capable to take on other’s deep-rooted struggles. I felt I needed to focus more on learning about myself first).
Even though I didn’t want to health coach yet, I still saw so much value in the second half of the course which was tailored around giving you tools to run your own business.
I still live my life according to the wellness wheel used in this course. And now, two years after completing the course, my blog is newly structured around the IIN wellness wheel. IIN gave me way more than I could have asked for. It taught me how to live a holistic lifestyle.
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If you have any further questions about IIN feel free to reach out to me directly.
This is not a paid sponsorship. I just loved the course and I believe in the curriculum. BUT, if you choose to enroll, it would be SO AWESOME if you list my name as a referral. There are free sample courses you can access either link below:
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